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This chapter concentrates on solicitors and their staff and the nature and quality of the legal defence and ‘representation’ they provide to these clients on a routine basis. It starts by presenting the development of criminal defence. While recommending that legal aid for trials in the higher criminal courts and for committals should be the norm, the Widgery Committee argued that legal representation for magistrates' court defendants should remain a minority phenomenon and that legal aid should be granted only in certain specified circumstances, under what were to become known as the...

This chapter concentrates on solicitors and their staff and the nature and quality of the legal defence and ‘representation’ they provide to these clients on a routine basis. It starts by presenting the development of criminal defence. While recommending that legal aid for trials in the higher criminal courts and for committals should be the norm, the Widgery Committee argued that legal representation for magistrates' court defendants should remain a minority phenomenon and that legal aid should be granted only in certain specified circumstances, under what were to become known as the ‘Widgery criteria’. The data cannot be claimed that the forty-eight firms of solicitors constitute a fully representative sample of the total of between 6,000 and 7,000 separate solicitors' offices in the country who undertake criminal defence work under legal aid each year.